Anna Kevrel

Artist Biography

Anna Kevrel is a photographer born in Latvia, living and working in Moscow (Russia), specializing in self-portraits. She started taking selfies with her cell phone in 2014, which allowed her to create a large number of images. Self-portraiture is a way for her to express her great creativity and gives her unlimited freedom of expression. She used this tool to create images with strange, familiar, offbeat, or ironic atmospheres. At that time she created atmospheres, but also and above all an extraordinary variety of representations. Anna played with temporality, geography and gender in her creations: she was herself, nobody and everybody at the same time. Through these diverse explorations, she focuses on questioning the human personality and how each element that surrounds it metamorphoses it. She explores the fluid nature of identity.

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It was certainly her fascination with the human being and the desire to create characters and atmospheres that led her to become interested in theatrical performance the following year. In 2016, she enrolled in a clown and mime school, which will have a lasting impact on the way she works and presents her work. During these four years, Anna learned how to create grotesque characters, design costumes and acquire basic stage design skills.

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Thanks to all her experiences, she pushed the sensitivity of her images even further. She bought a digital camera and decided to hide her face behind a mask. For Anna, wearing a mask is not only a great homage to the theater, but also allows the viewer to focus on the subject through the absence of facial features. The mask depersonalizes and is more universal. The character becomes a blank page, an anonymous face that is easier and more intuitive for the viewer to identify with, who is then better able to project themselves into the work to understand and feel the emotion in a more personal way.

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Today, emotion is central to Anna Kevrel's work. For her, it is the universal language par excellence, a message that everyone has experienced and can feel and understand, regardless of background, education, age, gender or any other factor.

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Her sense of emotion, combined with an acute knowledge of composition and photographic technique, plunges us into environments composed of striking scenes that amplify the emotion of the person portrayed. The decor is not there to simply dress up the image, but plays an active part in creating the emotion. Anna works exclusively from photographs. The artist uses all her skills to create her sets in order to limit her intervention in post-production. It's her skill with lighting and color that allows her to create vivid, powerful images. Lighting is a very important part of her work, as it is through lighting that she is able to give her work a high decorative quality and very clear colors.

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Her scenographic and theatrical skills are undeniable. She presents us with expressive poses and glances that say it all. At a glance, the character is laid bare before us, his or her emotions exposed, an opportunity to confront the viewer with the universality of human emotions. This bodily expressiveness is a legacy of her training as a clown and mime, both of which are characters who are subject to emotions and who must express them in almost extreme ways to make themselves understood, even if it means verging on the grotesque or ironic.

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For her, the human being is the best subject for exploring her favorite themes of self-irony and self-reflection. Through her fictional characters, unreal but full of emotion, she manages to touch another person's world through their interests, doubts or moods. By exploring herself, she encourages viewers to ask questions about their own feelings, a situation that echoes her personal motto: "Never stop exploring yourself.